Globalisation: Issues in World Change .
Agrarian Organisation & Change
As can be gathered from uprising in Mexico in 1996, the organisation of land tenure and of food production in the post colonial world is an issue of contemporary importance and one in which conflict is often played out in the most overt form.
That being said it is fallacious to suggest that the organisation of land tenure is identical in all of the South any more than it is in the industrialised agricultural sectors of the First World.
Some common factors however do present themselves, in particular, when the influence of the world economy begins to impact on the agrarian practices of individual countries. One other obvious area of commonality land tenure practices for almost all of the third world is the legacy of European Colonialism and the affect that this has on agrarian organisation.
Significant historical differences do exist in terms of the context in which imperialism was to be imposed and it is vitally important to eschew any romanticised notions of free and equal communal collective labour, that which Marx called "primitive communism" as commonplace in pre-colonial times.
Tribal hierarchies were certainly well established in Africa long before any significant incursion by the European powers. In Latin America well organised and extremely plutocratic regimes existed in the Mayan, Incan and Aztec eras before the "discovery" of the continent by Europe.
For the most part however, then as now, the majority of the worlds population gained the material means of existence by small scale subsistence agriculture, most often with "tributes" in kind paid to the appropriate authority. One major change that is consequent on the use of rural to urban migrant labour is that the gender profile of subsistence agriculture has altered, with the major part of subsistence produce now being the labour of women.
Seasonal migrant labour patterns were also commonplace particularly in early colonial Africa, and one must assume pre-existed the arrival of the metropolitan powers. Payment for this type of labour was, as in early Europe, most commonly made by an end of task feast and or other produce. With the arrival of the forces of imperialism in Latin America at first and certainly in the much later conquest of Africa pre-existing hierarchies and power structures were
consolidated and extended. In much of central and South America those power bases that were seen to be a potential or present threat were obliterated with the major part of the indigenous population marginalised to poor quality land, whilst the importation of slave labour from Africa allowed the development of extensive large scale plantation cultivation of primary crops for exportation to the "mother" country. In Africa and Asia the conquering power's need for low cost labour in plantation agriculture saw the imposition of new patterns of land tenure. In
most of Africa European landowners took by conquest, collaboration or default the best available land and given that slavery was no longer an option a market for wage labour had to be established either by imported labour from China and more commonly in Southern Africa from South Asia, or by the dispossession of subsistence farmers from land creating the same sort of landless peasantry that had made up the labour force for
Europe's early industrial expansion.
If land tenure patterns were to fundamentally altered by the process of conquest which began in the fifteenth century and only ended after the second World War the absorption of the production of primary agricultural goods into the world economic system was to be just as significant and for the majority just as damaging, it is however a process that continues today and is occasionally resisted by that majority. The impact of very large scale input intensive, low labour cost farming techniques both in the metropolitan countries (notably in the US and the EU) and the Third World has had deeply detrimental affects on the peasant farmers who are forced to compete in the world market place on price for basic primary foodstuffs such as coffee, sugar, or fruit. The growing use of sophisticated highly mechanised techniques in the Third World both has had the effects of increasing farm size, concentrating wealth in fewer hands, and of reducing the need for paid manual labour. The restrictions enforced by multi-national chemico-agribusiness on newly developed strains of grain effectively excludes the poorest cultivators from the benefits of enhanced yield that these provide. Even those peasant farmers who have quite rationally decided to replace traditional cash crops with hemp, opium or coca find themselves at the mercy of well armed and well organised indigenous elites determined to rest control of the finished product (and hence the major part of the value) for themselves.
The main beneficiaries of the technological innovations in agricultural practices that have so enormously increased world food production have been and continue to be only the elites in the Third World and of course the stock holders of the huge multi-national multi-sector commercio-industrial companies that control so much of the world's food production. For much of the planets population the present position is that so lucidly put by the leaders of the Chiapas uprising in Mexico "There is no longer any way to survive the situation.....There is no work, no land, no education."
For an article by Charlotte Denny fromThe Guardian on Water use go here
